


the indentation of one's own life

by TolkienGirl



Category: White Collar
Genre: Character Study, Episode: s02e15 Power Play, F/M, Gen, I've never cared about Sara enough before and I do now, Season/Series 02, The Missing Raphael
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-21 01:13:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16149437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/pseuds/TolkienGirl
Summary: Summer has gone on too long.





	the indentation of one's own life

She’s a big girl, doesn’t limp when her heels pinch, holds her liquor and her tears with equal grace.

She’s been dead and resurrected in the same city.

She can afford a great many things, but she only spends money where it shows—a handbag here, a pair of earrings there, and once, an enameled Japanese tea-set that gathers dust because she is never at home to make tea.

Sara is alone in life and has always been careful not to consider this a drawback. Competence is a suit of armor, and it only has room for one.

So, to be honest, does a casket.

She’s a big girl, yes, but she’s tired. Summer has gone on so long.

 

 _Summer_. Summer is slick on her skin, and nobody’s AC works quite well enough. All the air is artificial anyway, cloying.

Is it any wonder that she wants an escape?

Or _something like that_?

 

It wasn’t exactly animosity—alright, maybe it was. Maybe there _was_ some justice in seeing Neal Caffrey brought to justice, the man who got away with everything not being allowed to just _get away_.

She wanted her Raphael and so she slew her dragon; until it faded from her mind without satisfaction or closure, until she ran into him on a Manhattan Street five years later, and he was still all charm and all frustration.

(He isn’t the dragon after all.)

 

Neal and Peter are a mismatched set working in perfect synchronicity. And Neal has his strange little friend, and Peter has his radiantly self-assured wife, and Sara has…

She has them, but only by oblique angles and her own self-sponsored entry. She has offered to help; she has explained it away. She has tried to become more than a case, filed and resolved weeks ago.

 

Summer has gone too long, the city is flickering in and out of light, and so, so many people went through Ellis Island in 1946.

 

Sarah seems no closer to what she thought she was looking for.

(When Neal’s lips meet and melt with hers, she thinks that maybe she is.)


End file.
